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- social innovation (2) (entfernen)
Social innovations «meet social needs», are «good for society» and «enhance society’s capacity to act». But what does their rising importance tell us about the current state of public policy in Europe and its effectiveness in achieving social and economic goals? Some might see social innovation as a critique of public intervention, filling the gaps left by years of policy failure. Others emphasise the innovative potential of cross-boundary collaboration between the public sector, the private sector, the third sector and the household.
This paper explores the conditions under which the state either enables or constrains effective social innovation by transcending the boundaries between different actors. We argue that social innovation is closely linked to public sector innovation, particularly in relation to new modes of policy production and implementation, and to new forms of organisation within the state that challenge functional demarcations and role definitions.
Solutions to empower and (re-)engage vulnerable and marginalised populations to unfold their hidden potential allowing them to fully participate the social, economic, cultural and political life, necessarily involve institutional change. This in turn necessitates understanding the processes and mechanisms by which social innovations lead to in-stitutional change. Considering the specific nature of social innova-tions as interactive, generative and contextualised phenomena while maintaining that many practices at the micro-level can add up to patterns and regularities at the macro-level, middle-range theorising (MRT) is proposed as an appropriate method to theoreti-cally underpin and substantiate theoretical advancements towards a multidisciplinary perspective on the economic dimensions of social innovation, identifying the direction of future empirical inquiries.